The Altar of You
by Nagia
Summary: Someday, he will stand before his own grave--and hers too--and ask himself what his true sin was. VY.


**The Altar of You**

* * *

standing in that sepulcher;

Someday, he will stand before his own grave--and hers too--and ask himself what his true sin was. He will wonder how things might have ended differently. He will wonder with his eagle-eyed hindsight just how he could have changed things.

The paths of what might have been are not given to man to know.

Vincent Valentine won't care. He'll stand in front of the implacable marble tablet bearing Yuffie's name in the Wutaian script, and he'll play what-if and maybe and might have done. His thoughts will circle around and around and around and around in his head, more cyclical than weather, easier than breathing.

In the end, he will always go back to the beginning, and then he will evaluate the end.

In the end, some things are inevitable.

He will never be satisfied with that answer.

* * *

rain once beat against our windows;

The sky is pouring, the dark clouds above them are floodgates that have opened. The world has been drenched and the sun has gone dark. Everywhere, long sharp needles of cold water are falling.

The wind slams the rain against the glass panes that protect the windows in Kalm. Suddenly, he's glad he's not in Wutai, where windows are made of paper, or in Cosmo Canyon, where they don't exist at all.

"She's too damn young for this shit," Cid grumbles from his place, in the bed the farthest away from the window. The wet cold irritates his already inflamed lungs. He draws out the word _shit_ until it's almost a _shee-yit_, but it's not quite a drawl.

By the window, Yuffie has her face pressed up against the glass and Vincent is trying so very hard not to feel anything about that, even as he agrees so very strongly with Cid. Sixteen is too young, too raw, too perfect. She should be able to keep it.

Not that she's not already keeping it. He wants to tell her that the inkeeper won't appreciate imprints of her mouth and nose on that window. He wants to touch her arm and see if she'll look at him with the same sort of passion.

He wants it to stop raining.

* * *

you were a needle in my flesh;

Who broke whose heart? The story is more intricate and delicate than a spiderweb. The truth--their truth--is such a fragile thing, not easily found. But once the truth emerges, it cuts and it kills and it sickens.

Their truth is better bent.

But who broke whose heart? Did the thief hold out her soul to the killer, her fingers stained from nail to knuckle with her own blood, her mouth red and her body throbbing? Did the killer take that rust brown soul in his own monstrous hands and crush it slowly, squeezing until it was nothing more than dust?

Was it the thief's mouth that opened in wet anguish as she sank to her knees?

Or did the killer lay his charred, twisted love at her feet, only to watch as she ground her bright yellow running shoe on it, her mind and eyes full of paper lanterns and a dragon-river?

* * *

never thought she'd turn twenty-nine;

Her very first gray hair terrifies him, though he tries not to show it. He makes an intense effort not to let her see that he has finally begun to realize the consequences of her mortality from the perspective of an immortal.

Soon, she will look older than he does. She will hate her body, he knows, will hate its sudden frailty. She will see it as traitorous, she will see herself as ugly.

And after that, she will die.

Yuffie flushes the gray hair down the toilet and he pulls her close. His mind is half-full with the implications and half-full with the desire to run. To cut his losses. If he kills his feelings for her now, if he runs away _at this very instant_, he won't have to watch her die.

This isn't what I saved the world for, he thinks.

He's wrong.

* * *

alone on that precipice with you;

He expected her to chase him.

He didn't expect her to chase him this far. Vincent stares out at the canyons and hills of the Cosmo area. The Cosmo Candle is a harsh light in the dusk, almost a second sun setting.

"You just left," she says, her voice harsh from disuse, cracking from emotion.

For the first time he has ever heard, Yuffie Kisaragi sounds defeated.

"Yes," he admits. "I did."

She never answers. She leaves just as silently as she appeared, just as skillfully, and he is alone with the brilliant Cosmo Canyon sunset, and the candle is a second sun in his eyes, punishing him for being such an idiot.

He won't run after her.

She won't come looking again.

He knows as he watches that sun set slowly that they've reached their impasse. This is the end of their story and its beginning, too. His mistake is circling around and around and around in his head, but there's no fixing it now.

Cosmo Canyon is warm at night. He wishes it would rain.

* * *

kneeling at the altar of you;

Incense floats up from braziers to the ceiling, make the air feel thick in his mouth. Months, years, decades later and he still makes the pilgrimage on a regular basis.

He goes down to his knees, then bends forward so that his head touches the floor.

"Nothing has changed," Vincent Valentine tells the place where Yuffie Kisaragi once prayed.

_Yep,_ she would agree with him. _You're still a dumbass_.

Some things are inevitable.


End file.
